Book Review: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

Chris recommends this book to everyone he talks with! Mr. Mollick is a professor of management at Wharton, specializing in entrepreneurship and innovation. He’s been following and researching the emergence of AI for a while now, having been featured in various publications. In addition to a fascination with how AI is impacting businesses, especially start-ups, he’s very interested in how it’s impacting education, especially at the college level.

Historically, when new technology comes out, we can install it, learn how it works, then use it. We learn that when we follow certain steps or key strokes, we know exactly what the outcome will be. AI doesn’t work like this at all! You can give an AI tool the exact same information or request and you will NOT get the same answer, the same result. It’s as if you’re working with an alien mind.

Mr. Mollick has four rules for working with AI. Principle 1: Always invite AI to the table. Principle 2: Be the human in the loop. Principle 3: Treat AI like a person (but tell it what kind of person it is). Principle 4: Assume this is the worst AI you’ll ever use.

We’ve encouraged our teams and clients to include AI in email drafts, procedures, documentation, contract review, and more. Whether you do the initial draft and ask for ideas, or you ask it for the initial draft and then add the human touch. Darren Hardy had an interesting formula – you do the first 30% of the work, let AI do the next 40%, then back to the human for the last 30%. Let AI do the heavy lifting, the boring stuff.

But in this book, he’s encouraging us to also invite AI to add creative touches. He has some very interesting responses from AI to some specific inquiries he gave it. I’ve seen an article edited to have an Irish style for St. Patrick’s day; a list of alternative titles for articles, clarifying whether they are to be fun or serious; a rough draft of an awards certificate; adding a more formal or more fun vibe; and more.

What’s this about the ‘worst AI’? Throughout the book, Mr. Mollick shares his research, giving AI models the same instructions with previous versions of ChatGPT and later versions, including creative pictures; it’s truly stunning to see the improvements. This will only get better, so at this point, it’s great, but tomorrow it will be better!

The AI revolution in the workplace is much different than previous automation. Historically these addressed repetitive or dangerous jobs. In this revolution, AI overlaps with some of the highly compensated and creative jobs. We can delegate and automate the mundane tasks while also bringing our uniquely human traits to managing and curating AI’s creative output. He also spends some time addressing people’s concerns about being ‘replaced’ at work and what this can look like, even for him as a professor. LOTS to dig into here! Highly Recommended! – CMW